Fashion beyond
One day I read that fashion is almost always forced to justify its existence, and I immediately thought that in the age of political correctness nothing could be truer.
Passing through the glitz of via Montenapoleone during the last fashion week required a considerable effort of conscience, aware, as we all were unfortunately, that the indescribable tragedy of the Russia-Ukraine conflict was unfolding on our doorstep. While images of death and destruction alternated with almost unbearable jarringness with the colours (to life, more like) of Milan's exuberant fashion week under premature spring sunshine, we were all, more or less, crossed by a creeping sense of guilt. You could clearly perceive the discomfort of those in the industry, who seemed almost to be asking for absolution from the sin of continuing undaunted to work at the anonymous tribunal of that part of public opinion which, punctual as always when you don't ask its opinion, is there ready to remind you that the world is going down the drain while you, useless tailor, stylist, model, journalist, are continuing to work for something that does nothing to lift its fortunes.
However, we have been accustomed for years now to the keyboard lions, who have turned the enormous advantage of social media to have free and immediate access to any kind of content, into the even greater disadvantage of accompanying it with the nastiness that they are, alas, free to express within seconds. However, what made me the most curious was that, in those days, no other industry felt the almost moral duty to apologise for wanting to show the result of months and months of work and to continue to produce despite an ongoing war. And this, without a shadow of a doubt, is due to the trivial prejudice the fashion system has been forced to live with for as long as it can remember. Despite the fact that times have evolved and, hopefully, minds as well, the uncompromising morality of our society has not yet come to terms completely with fashion, which has always been considered something negatively frivolous and ephemeral, confined to the interests of those who can spend exorbitant sums on this or that item of clothing. But as well as occupying around 4% of the national GDP, and thus involving the work of millions of people, whose sweat deserves equal dignity to that of any other employed in other sectors, the fashion industry is something that has to do with everyone, even its fiercest detractors: who, after all, does not wear clothes, whether haute couture or from the local market?
Who knows if the reasons for this ancestral prejudice are not to be found in even too recent times. If, before the 19th century, dress codes were rules that served to highlight the inequalities between social classes, after the French Revolution with the Ancient régime the habit of resorting to excessive opulence also fell and a new-found morality in customs. The rise of the bourgeois class, in fact, brought with it new demands on the to which it was necessary to respond with more sober and essential clothing, so that all men, indiscriminately, gave up their taste in clothes to make room for a more functional aesthetic, wearing a dark three-piece suit that became known as the 'bourgeois uniform'. And while men took care of important matters by wearing a uniform that went well in every situation, women continued to worry about what dress to wear at different times of the day and what accessory to go with it: from this moment on, fashion became woman, where woman was synonymous with freedom from the worries of real life, which instead remained a prerogative of the male world.
Although more than two centuries have passed since then, there is still an unresolved flavour about this issue, leaving this 19th-century and, let's face it, also somewhat sexist prejudice, a knot yet to be unravelled. As well as teaching us that man forgives but does not forget, the post-French Revolution dress code is just one of the many examples that could be cited to demonstrate that fashion is by no means something evanescent and an end in itself, but has always been a very concrete representation of the times it has passed through: wars, destruction, plagues, deaths and rebirths are reflected in the clothes we wear, and so, together with history, the fabrics, colours, patterns and models change. If with the discovery of America a trend of clothes embellished with gems imported from the New World spread in Europe, while around the middle of the 19th century, after the wave of tuberculosis that had afflicted our continent, there was a sort of aesthetisation of the disease with the elaboration of a more fragile and pale ideal of beauty, today, in the aftermath (or almost) of more than two years of Coronavirus, fashion is the spokesman of a newfound desire to live, explore, experiment. Not only that, for some time now the fashion industry has become a cross pollination of stories, messages and influences from art, cinema and literature, making it a multiform picture in which diversity coexists in a single narrative.
Fashion, then, is by no means something stupid, indeed, stupid would be to continue to persist in not conceiving of it as one of the world's most thriving industries, whose operation requires skill, passion and even a certain amount of self-denial. And it is only by combating stereotypes and prejudices that one can come to see it for what it really is, that is, something that goes beyond clothes and beyond fashion itself, affecting contemporaneity and our daily lives much more than one can even remotely imagine.
